Using Emulators to Assess the Climate Sensitivity of a Vegetation Model

Vegetation models can be used to assess the impacts of climate change on future food production (i.e. farming). However, vegetation models are computationally expensive to run and to account for the uncertainty in future climate scenarios the models should, ideally, be run using as many different scenarios as possible. One way of reducing the computational cost of this procedure is to fit a statistical model to a suitable subset of vegetation model runs and then use the statistical model to cheaply obtain estimates of the vegetation model.